Stove-burning gives way to acid attack in Pakistan

What Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy has documented in her Oscar-winning Saving Face is neither a new phenomenon nor it is something that nobody in Pakistan and outside the country knows about.
For decades, men in Pakistan have mutilated women's faces by throwing acid or other corrosive or

What Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy has documented in her Oscar-winning Saving Face is neither a new phenomenon nor it is something that nobody in Pakistan and outside the country knows about.

For decades, men in Pakistan have mutilated women's faces by throwing acid or other corrosive or incendiary material after accusing them of having illicit relations, taking umbrage over their refusal to respond positively to sexual innuendos and advances, or becoming upset over the rejection of marriage proposals.

This has created national and international headlines more than once, including a 2001 cover of the Time magazine which featured an acid-burn victim named Fakhra. The son of a former provincial governor - angry over her insistence that they needed to legalise their relationship - threw acid on her face, damaging it beyond recognition.

Tehmina Durrani, an ex-wife of the same governor, then took up Fakhra's cause in the national and international media, succeeding in convincing an Italian charity, Smile Again Foundation, to provide for her treatment. The charity later started working with a Pakistani partner for the treatment and rehabilitation of other victims as well before the whole arrangement fell apart in 2009 because of allegations of corruption.

Rights activists say that the phenomenon of acid attacks succeeds the phenomenon of stove-burning, which was quite prevalent in rural parts of the Punjab province in 1980s and early 1990s.

In those decades, "the activists ran vociferous campaigns in the media as well as on the streets against what was then called stove deaths and, by the mid-1990s, the number of casualties it caused started gradually decreasing," says Mehnaz Ajmal, an Islamabad-based researcher who has worked with a number of pro-women projects over the years. But then, "almost simultaneously deaths due to acid-throwing started increasing," she adds.

Until a couple of years ago, around 150 women, according to police statistics, would become victims of acid attacks every year, mainly but not exclusively in the central Pakistan region comprising the south Punjab districts of Khanewal, Multan, Muzaffargarh among others.

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